


beochaoineadh

by all_these_ghosts



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Season/Series 11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-04-04 23:35:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14031306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/all_these_ghosts/pseuds/all_these_ghosts
Summary: “He’s still out there. Maybe that’s the last X-file.”





	beochaoineadh

_an elegy for the living; a lament for someone who has gone away_

* * *

1.

“What do you think he’s like?” she asks. The night is quiet around them. No more squeals or shakes through the thin walls. No gunshots. No doppelgangers. No ghosts.

Except for one.

Mulder’s breath, hot on her ear. “Tall,” he finally says.

“I’m serious.”

“So’m I.” He rubs his nose against her neck. “I’m tall. The men in your family are tall.”

“You know what I meant.” Scully stretches her legs out, twining them with his. Another case, another motel room where she’s somehow found herself sharing his bed. She’s starting to wonder if Mulder calls around in advance, trying to find out which motels are down to one available room.

Once was a mistake. Twice was a coincidence. Three times, well — three times is probably a choice, whether or not she’s ready to admit it.

“I don’t think this is gonna help, Scully.” His hand strays lower, drawing circles over her hip bone. It’s more prominent now than it used to be; she’s sharper everywhere these days. Sometimes Mulder runs his hand down her spine and counts each vertebra.

She says, “Ignoring it hasn’t helped either.”

For a while he’s quiet, and when he finally speaks, his voice is so low she strains to hear him. “The other day you asked me what would happen if I found somebody else.”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“Why did you say that?” he asks, insistent.

She can feel him looking at her, but she doesn’t meet his eyes. It’s nothing she can say out loud. It’s just that she thinks of herself, more and more often lately, as… _wasted_. Sometimes she thinks about the woman she was thirty years ago, the things she wanted for herself, and now — what happened to all of that time? What happened to all of that promise?

He doesn’t wait for her to explain. “Scully, you can’t possibly think that I would—”

“There are plenty of beautiful women, Mulder.”

“Yeah, but when’s the last time I was interested in any of them except you?”

She sits up, holding the sheet across her chest, suddenly self-conscious. “I wasn’t fishing.”

“I know that.” He puts a hand on her knee. It’s warm even through the layers of blankets. “But you can’t believe I’m going to run off and impregnate some twenty-five-year-old _now_. That wasn’t ever something I wanted.”

It takes a moment for him to realize what he’s said, and she watches it happen. His brow knits. He opens his mouth once, twice; a fish drowning in air.

Her voice is flat. “You never wanted him.”

“That’s not—“ he starts, but it’s not a correction, not really. “I wanted what you wanted.”

“That isn’t the same thing.” She swallows and turns away. “It was a loss. I lost him, Mulder, and I never really finished mourning. You know?”

Sometimes she suspects that he doesn’t know; maybe that’s the whole problem.

The mattress creaks beneath them as he shifts. “He’s tall,” Mulder says to her back. “He needs a haircut. Goes to church every Sunday. Lutheran — sorry.”

Scully snorts.

“He’s better at English than math. He checks out philosophy books from the public library. He keeps losing them, but the librarians waive his fees.”

“Is this an autobiography, Mulder?”

He nuzzles her shoulder. “I charmed the hell out of those librarians.”

“I just want to see him,” she says, and suddenly her eyelashes are catching tears. “Just once. Just to know that he’s okay.”

“He’s out there, Scully. And one day--“

She doesn’t let him finish. “You don’t know that.”

“I do,” he says firmly. “As much as I know anything.”

There have been weeks — maybe even years — when she’s survived on nothing but the strength of his beliefs. Why is it so hard for her to believe him now?

Under the window the heater clanks to life. He pulls her closer, their edges blurring. In the white noise she drifts off to dream of long hallways and white walls, the sound of gunshots, a dark-haired boy she has always known.

* * *

2.

His bed was made.

It was the first thing she noticed upon walking into the bedroom of the child she’d given up sixteen years earlier. In a house with two dead bodies, it was the thing that seemed most out of place. What kind of seventeen-year-old boy makes his bed?

_Mine_ , she’d thought in the moment. Growing up she had made her bed every morning with military precision, perfect hospital corners. They all had, even Charlie. They all shared that attention to detail, that not-quite-obsessive desire to see their small corner of the world put to rights.

It was all the proof she needed, whatever she told Mulder later.

Now she turns the broken snow globe over in her hands, rubbing her thumb over the duct tape. In the perfect neatness of her apartment, this small broken thing was out of place. It fits in better here at their old house, where everything is dusty and half-ruined.

“I was right that he needed a haircut,” Mulder says, his eyes on her hands.

Scully laughs weakly. “Yeah.”

Seeing William on the security camera — she’s played that footage over and over again in her mind. What if she’d realized, what if she’d said something, what if she’d thrown him in the back of their car and driven off with him into the sunset?

What if she could have finally saved him?

Mulder says, “We saw him.”

“Yeah,” she says again.

He reaches over to brush the hair back from her eyes. “Is it enough?” he asks seriously.

All the years she spent wondering. The dreams she’s had all along — how many of them were visions instead? She wants to believe that they’ll continue. That whatever else she’s lost, the connection will remain.

Her voice is raspy. “I don’t know.”

The light slants in through the front windows. They’re dirty again. Mulder’s never been much for the details. She sets the snow globe down on the windowsill. The fake snow catches the light and glitters as it falls.

_You seem like a nice person_ , he’d said. _I wish I could know you better_. A benediction. A release. Why can’t she let him go so easily?

“In my vision, he was the only one who could save you,” she says, still staring out the window. “What if we can’t find him again?”

“We’ll find another way. We always do.”

It’s still clearer than memory for her: Mulder slumped over in the passenger seat, lights in the sky. He’s come back from the dead once already; she can’t imagine they would get another reprieve. She persists. “It’s never been the end of the world before.”

At that, he laughs. “Scully, it’s been the end of the world a _lot_.”

_And every time_ , she thinks, _we get closer to the real thing_.

* * *

3.

Since the fire she’s moved back into their old house. She keeps saying it’s temporary, but neither of them believe it.

They got back from Connecticut three days ago, and he’s slept for no more than five hours total since the plane touched down. He can’t stop thinking about that little girl and her mother. A woman in flames; a tiny body in the woods, gnawed to the bone.

Her name was Emily.

It’s too much, sometimes.

“Scully,” he says, and she rests her fork on the side of her plate and looks up at him.

She still sleeps just fine. He watches her sometimes, the way her eyelids flutter in the darkness, the dreams or portents behind them. Still, the skin around her eyes is darker, and the rest of her pale.

She raises one eyebrow, still waiting.

He says, “I think I’m too old for this.”

The soft affection in her eyes could undo him. She rests her hand on his, gently. “I’ve been saying that for years, Mulder.”

Whenever a file comes across his desk now, he has to avert his gaze from the pictures. He remembers being able to stare at photos of dead children for hours, looking for details that everyone else missed. Scouring their broken bodies for signs, for answers. Scully’s retained her clinical distance better than he has.

All the horror follows him. Every dead child is Emily. Every suicide victim is his mother, every missing girl is his sister. He’s seen his own son dead now, too, even if it was just some trick of the mind.

_I have a son_ , he’d told that woman, though it felt like a lie. _He’s grown now_.

He knows that Scully has always felt guilty that she wasn’t there for William, that she wasn’t there to protect him — whether from scrapes and misunderstandings or from government agents, all the same. But he’s never felt that way, not for a second. He knows that parents are no guarantee of safety.

When they thought William was dead — and he knew that boy was their son, whatever he told Scully later — all he could think was that William had probably gotten ten more years with his adoptive parents than he would have had with them.

“But we can’t quit now,” she says, and he closes his eyes and remembers all the times they have said those words to one another. They always say it, but they never get any closer to the truth. It’s just as elusive as it was that rainy night in Oregon.

“What if it kills us?”

Scully’s jaw is set. “That’s what we signed up for, Mulder. That’s our job. We risk our lives so others don’t have to.” Her gaze, suddenly far away. “We sacrifice, so others don’t have to.”

He thinks, _What do we have left to sacrifice?_ , but he knows, of course. Their son, somewhere on the road, one hard turn away from a collision with destiny.

“He’s still out there,” she says. The smile she turns on him is almost wistful. “Maybe that’s the last X-file.”

* * *

4.

The church glows, and for a moment he feels what Scully must feel: awe and gravity; that sense that the universe is always both immutable and in motion. He looks at her in the dim light and is reminded, for the thousandth time, that every declaration of faith he’s ever made has been for her.

When they were young he read her mind once. In that moment he had known her, suddenly and completely; in that moment, he received the answers to questions he had always been too afraid to ask. Back then he couldn’t have known everything that would come to pass, everything that would render her unknowable again.

Now he has no superpowers. Now he needs her to say it out loud.

Mulder lights the candle. For Scully, for himself. For their son. Once he’d have recited other names, a list too long to bear, but no longer. They are moving forward. He is moving forward and the dead are at peace, he believes that, and now their prayers are for the living.

They leave the church hand in hand. Above them the stars hang bright. The universe is always both immutable and in motion. Tonight, they’ll be the ones moving it.

He opens the passenger side door of his car for her, like he’s been doing for decades. As they settle in, she exhales long and low, and in that instant he remembers every brave and stupid thing they’ve ever done. _Forward_ , he tells himself again.

Let them be brave and stupid all over again. He’s sure they haven’t forgotten how. They’ve had decades of practice.

He chucks his phone out the window and pulls the map out of the glove compartment, spreads it over the steering wheel. The handwriting on it is just slightly off-kilter, too familiar; it takes him a second to realize how similar it is to his own.

“You’re sure it’s from him?”

Scully swallows, reaches out to flatten a wrinkle across West Virginia. Her hand still looks so small. She says, “I’m sure.”

Their leap of faith.

And he still believes in miracles. They just need one more.

She takes the map from him and licks her lips. It makes him want to kiss her — he always wants to kiss her. There’s one immutable fact about the universe.

He would tell her he loves her, but he’s hanging on to that for later. Just in case.

Briefly she touches the cross at her neck, then the map again, before she rests her hand on his knee. She looks at him. “Are you ready?”

He drives.


End file.
